The remainder of the weekend was busy with Music Club, walking in the Howardian Hills and ploughing through The Rainbow (which involved much gnashing of teeth), so I put the parsnips in our coal shed and retrieved them on Saturday 8th February.
I cut the parsnips into small pieces, covered them in our largest pan with eight pints of water and let them stand for a couple of hours whilst I did other wine-making things - mostly rinsing and sterilising bottles for redcurrant wine.
I chopped each of the prunes into three or four pieces and put these in my bucket with 5 lbs 12 oz sugar. This is a touch less sugar than previous years and I do not know how much difference it will make. I brought the pan containing the parsnips to the boil and boiled them for twenty minutes. By this time the parsnips were soft and had lost much of their flavour. I poured the liquid over the prunes and sugar and discarded the parsnips. I boiled another seven pints of water and pourd this into the bucket too.
On Sunday morning I added the yeast and a teaspoon each of nutrient and pectolase. My recipe says I should also put in some amylase, but I have run out. If the wine hasn't cleared by racking I will buy a jar and put a teaspoon in then.
I left this until Thursday, 13 February, before sieving out the prunes and putting the liquid into its demijohns. This was a longer, stickier process than I had anticipated, and it looks like there will be a large amount of sludge at the bottom. I could have used about another pint of water. As usual, this is my brownest of wines.
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